Google Core Web Vitals & SEO
Even during the COVID-19 Pandemic we are doing our best to keep up to date with the latest news that impacts our small business clients. This includes attending Elementor Meet Ups via Zoom. The latest Meetup was focused on the information Google has released to help websites rank well for SEO.
The information released by Google is called the Core Web Vitals a website needs to perform well for SEO. This is great, as it gives us a lot more information about how to make a website as SEO friendly as possible.
These core web vitals are basically a set of technical performance criteria to help optimise the speed, interactivity and stability of a website.
Here are some of the major points about these Core Web Vitals:
Website Speed
As always, for Google, it is important that your website is fast. This means when someone clicks onto your website that it loads quickly. It is already known that if you have a website that is slow to load that people will click away and find a faster website. However, a slow website is also bad for SEO.
Fortunately there are 3 things that can be done quickly to speed up your website. These are:
a. Photos
By far the most common reason for a slow website is the size of photos. It is common for people to upload a photo without thinking about it’s size. For example, if you upload an image directly from your smartphone, it is normally 2-3 MBs in size. Unfortunately, most people upload multiple photos this size to their website. As a result it causes the website to get slower and slower. That’s why image optimisation is important. By using image optimiser software your images still look the same on the website but won’t slow it down.
As part our web design and SEO services we always make sure photos are optimised.
b. Hosting Servers
All websites need a hosting server. However, not all hosting servers are equal. Hosting servers such as GoDaddy and Crazy Domains, have some of the cheapest rates, but they also have some of the slowest server response times.
This means you really only get what you pay for when it comes to hosting your website. As a result, your SEO will be impacted by a cheap hosting plan that has a slow response time.
At Dynamic Websites, we offer hosting services to our clients with quality high speed Australian based servers.
c. Computer Processing Time
Although computers are very fast, they do have a lot of things they need to do. This include data that needs processing. An example of this is animation and special effects. They look great on a website but they need specialist scripts to make them work. This often requires them to be downloaded separately and only after the scripts have been loaded can the data be presented correctly.
Because of this, sometimes there needs to be a compromise between creating a visual effect and the speed of a website. Remember, there is no point having a great visual effect if it takes too long to load. The person will just click away.
As part of the Dynamic Websites design process we always carefully consider the impact on the speed of the website for any special features.
Dynamic Websites specialise in small business web design. We are based in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn and provide services throughout Australia. We understand what it takes to get a small business online at an affordable price and with the minimum of fuss. Along with designing websites for small business, tradies and NDIS service providers we provide online marketing services. Our online marketing for small business extends to Google Ads, Google My Business, Microsoft Advertising, search engine optimisation (SEO), content writing and, blog writing.
